From the bestselling author of Underground Airlines and Golden
State, this sweeping legal thriller follows a sixteen-year-old who
suffers from a neurological condition that has frozen him in time--and
the team of lawyers, doctors, and detectives who are desperate to wake
him up.
In 2008, a cheerful ambulance-chasing lawyer named Jay Shenk persuades
the grieving Keener family to sue a private LA hospital. Their son
Wesley has been transformed by a routine surgery into a kind of golem,
absent all normal functioning or personality, walking in endless empty
circles around his hospital room. In 2019, Shenk--still in practice but
a shell of his former self--is hired to defend Wesley Keener's father
when he is charged with murder . . . the murder, as it turns out, of the
expert witness from the 2008 hospital case. Shenk's adopted son, a
fragile teenager in 2008, is a wayward adult, though he may find his
purpose when he investigates what really happened to the murdered
witness.
Two thrilling trials braid together, medical malpractice and murder,
jostling us back and forth in time.
The Quiet Boy is a book full of mysteries, not only about the death of
a brilliant scientist, not only about the outcome of the medical
malpractice suit, but about the relationship between children and their
parents, between the past and the present, between truth and lies. At
the center of it all is Wesley Keener, endlessly walking, staring
empty-eyed, in whose quiet, hollow body may lie the fate of humankind.
